Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Good Country People

Joe McTyre/Atlanta ConstitutionFlannery O’Connor in her driveway, in 1962.

Some years ago, shortly after I came to The Times, I overheard a colleague disparaging Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. Well, I remember thinking, at least I know not to trust this person’s judgment.

As Brad Gooch points out in his biography “Flannery” (reviewed by Joy Williams two days ago in the Book Review), O’Connor is now “a one-woman academic industry.” And yet, it seems as if a lot of people have a Flannery problem even today, when her place in the canon is secure. Has there been a better American short-story writer over the past 60 years? John Cheever and Donald Barthelme, who are also the subjects of new biographies, would get votes (though not from me), as would John Updike and Raymond Carver (though not from me).

Updike himself seemed to have no more than grudging respect for O’Connor, lumping her in with Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. Yes, they were all women. Yes, they were all Southerners. But one of them was “a genius” (as Alfred Kazin said) and the other two were, emphatically, not.

When the Library of America brought out an O’Connor volume 20 years ago, the critic Frederick Crews stood athwart literary history yelling Stop. Here’s what he wrote (subscription required) in The New York Review of Books:

The question of O’Connor’s stature is hardly settled for good. Is she really to be acknowledged as the pre-eminent fiction writer of the postwar period? No less an honor must have been intended by the publication … of her “Collected Works” in the prestigious Library of America series — the closest thing to a formal canonization that our dispersed and eclectic culture can now bestow. But to contemplate not a story or two but her whole body of fiction wedged against those of such demigods as Melville and James and Twain is to face the issue of her plenitude, or lack of it, in a suddenly glaring light. Placed in such company, O’Connor’s works for all their brilliance cannot conceal a certain narrowness of emphasis and predictability of technique.

Given that the Library of America, in the intervening years, has published the tales of H. P. Lovecraft, it seems safe to assume the editors there don’t automatically equate every choice with Melville, James and Twain. At any rate, Crews went on to say this:

Even the individually dazzling stories, once we have been alerted to the worldview that animates them, can all be seen to be performing the same religious maneuver — namely, a humbling of secular egoism to make way for a sudden infusion of God’s grace. That is not, one would think, a device with a great deal of literary mileage left in it, either inside or beyond the university.

Apparently, that’s the essence of the Flannery problem: readers have been alerted to her worldview. But couldn’t we just as easily declare of, say, Brecht that “even the individually dazzling plays, once we have been alerted to the worldview that animates them, can all be seen to be performing the same political maneuver”? By now it should go without saying that O’Connor’s best works (like Brecht’s) transcend a “narrow” worldview and “predictable” technique, and even have some “literary mileage” left in them. Crews knew this as well as anyone. As he put it toward the end of his essay:

For all her private loyalty to the church’s hopeful teachings, then, the world of O’Connor’s fiction remains radically askew. Readers immersed in that fiction without a lifeline to the doctrinal assurance found in her lectures and letters tend to feel an existential vertigo at the very moments where the Christian critics want them to feel most worshipful. And this response cannot be dismissed as a mere error, a product of incomplete knowledge. O’Connor’s works, we must understand, are not finally about salvation but about doom — the sudden and irremediable realization that there is no exit from being, for better or worse, exactly who one is.

I wasn’t aware that Library of America editions amounted to canonisation. I thought the purpose of the imprint was to keep perpetually in print American authors whose works were important in any of many senses, including influential vis-a-vis other writers or the culture in general. (You may argue whether Lovecraft was a good writer, but it’s hard to dismiss his influence on American culture.)

Along those lines, the L of A includes a volume of American sermons and two volumes of 1940s-50s pulp noir. Now, I doubt anyone would put “The Killer Inside Me” or “Nightmare Alley” in the same category as, say, “Pale Fire.” But they are good of their kind, and the genre was and is influential in American literary and mass culture; so, by that yardstick, they belong in the L of A.

And once you let in that riffraff, how could you justify leaving out O’Connor?

Updike’s damning with faint praise can perhaps be laid to the fact that they were mining some of the same Christian ethical territory, except O’ Connor was Catholic and Updike was Protestant.

Flannery gets my vote. Pick up the Collected Stories and you can almost feel heat emanating from the pages. Even the minor stories are awe-inspiring. She accomplished more with two slender novels, a clutch of short stories, and thirty nine years than the big boys (Cheever, Updike, Barthelme, etc.) did with vaster amounts of ink, better health, and decades more of writing time.

You need to look at this matter in perspective. When O’Connor’s works were given the Library of America imprint, it was a very huge deal, because up to that time ONLY the literary gods had made it past those pearly gates. Crews wasn’t the only one who raised an eyebrow; there was also Brad Leithauser in the New Yorker (although he was a good deal more respectful). Nowadays, it’s not quite so big a deal getting in the LOA. Ultimately it’s going to become a formal career step in some cases.

Just where O’Connor should rank in the canon is a subjective matter – but when it comes to sales, the Amazon rankings show she far outpaces Cheever and Barthelme, and that Gooch’s biography is far outselling “Hiding Man” and may well hold its own against Bailey’s volume. As some blogger or other noted the other day, Cheever and Barthelme are primarily read by MFA students. O’Connor is read in high-school and college English courses across the land, and especially (naturally) in the South.

This fall, Charles Shields publishes his biography of Kurt Vonnegut with Holt. And that’s a writer who has sold more in the last 40 years than O’Connor, Barthelme and Cheever combined, so look for that book to do almost as well as Shield’s bio of Harper Lee, the only literary biography published in the last decade to last as much as a month on the NY Times bestseller list. Old Kurt’s a more uneven writer than Flannery, Don and John, but quite a few of the kids (and those who were kids in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s) still love him.

The interesting thing isn’t that she’s in the LOA, where she clearly belongs, for all the narrowness of her brilliance. It’s that she entered it so early, and here a few things are worth bearing in mind: the willingness of her estate to make the work available (not always a given); the fact that much of the editorial work on the letters and essays had already been done; and the ease with which her entire ouevre could fit into a single volume. So no obstacles, and few decisions to make about selection or schedule, in a way that has likely slowed the appearance of other writers and volumes.

Flannery O’Connor’s writing is undoubtedly superb, the equal of anything published by the other authors mentioned in this blog post and accompanying posts.

As Crews pointed out, though, there is a narrowness to her oeuvre which is troubling. So many of her stories are effectively identical, in that they preach the same message, with characters who exhibit the same foibles, and with the same outcome. Whether she would have changed had she lived is an interesting, though ultimately pointless question. There were signs: her last story was different in style from her earlier work.

What is more interesting is what impact she has had on succeeding generations. What is her legacy? Has anyone taken up the mantle of southern, ‘Christ-haunted’ gothic?